Lessons learned from a decade of arranging events and creating experiences with others....
But what about those really deep and strong relationships with people we love and care about? What about girlfriends, wives, grandparents, close friends and colleagues? How are those formed? A lot has been said about this, and there's a lot more to be said. I have no answers, but I do have a theory that I'll try to explain. It takes out during what you could describe as forced and extreme circumstances in adulthood.
"Friends are those who stay when everybody else leave" is a popular saying which holds a lot of truth, and one of the best ways to evoke all sides in a person and find out whether you can live with them or not is to indulge in an unusual settlement where you have to cooperate and where it's hard or even impossible to leave when you've "had enough". Traditionally, these circumstances are offered in such environments as the military, great disasters, street gangs and prisons. Just as traditionally, these environments aren't voluntarily, which is part of the experience gained. Excluding the military (which holds many positive characteristics and whose obligations have a time limit) the above mentioned environments are a harsh and not to constructive way to grow as a human being. But if personal development and mental growth in the interaction with others is desired, and this under circumstances with a sound level of force that brings out the best (and worst) of you and makes you see and accept this in others, what are the options?
To me, arranging a happening together with peers who strive for the same outcome is optimal, and creating a motion picture is a project that holds all of the desired features. I have witnessed this in various settings of LARPs and film-making and have not yet seized to become fascinated by the development in a group and its individuals. As I have mentioned in previous articles, shooting a film is no glamorous escape from daily chores like vacuum-cleaning and doing the dishes, it's all that p l u s the attempt to create something out of nothing in a magical state of existence. At our level, creating a film means putting thirty strangers in a house far away from home where everyone ends up doing a little more than their job description originally included. Thirty individuals from all paths of life, with needs and feelings (and I'm glad that we have them, may I add) that have to live under the same roof and co-exist and cooperate professionally in the joint effort towards our final destination: the full-length movie. Does it work? Yes, indeed. The opportunities for getting sick of each other are many, about as many as there are possible disturbances for the production (as I said, everything from cars to catering has to work in order for the magic to materialize) but since the team consists of reasonable people who share a common goal, we usually manage to work our way around the problems and choose all the opportunities for enjoying each others company and have a few beers and laughs as we celebrate life and what we are creating right now. For truth is that even though not all of us will stay in touch in the future, we do share something unique which is a bond between us, or at least a strong basis for creating such a bond. One step remains, namely the act of staying when you no longer have to, in this case: taking up contact after the shootings are over. The key to bonds created between strangers in adulthood might be here, this mixture between "has to" and "wants to" that friendship and soulmating consists of. There's another saying that friends are tested in the time of great needs, and the process of shooting a movie is full of them. If you want to know yourself and others (given that you're prepared to take it as it comes, whatever may come), then go ahead and dare to create a vision greater than yourself and work towards it, giving all it takes.
However, this article wouldn't be complete without mentioning the complexity of man and how you can find friends at the most unlikely places. It's a small world, and the more people you meet, the more evident the net of correlation and relationships become. This is even more obvious in the small community where we're shooting right now: if you're the only film-team among 10,000 souls and the producer is a resident, word gets around. The clerk at the grocery store and the mailman become familiar faces with a name (this is actually true for New York City as well, just take some time to chat with the waiter next time you're eating out and you'll see) and the will to give a little extra. Everywhere, there are opportunities for networking, socializing, working on projects and maybe the hardest and finest expression of them all: bonding.
Stefan Lindqvist, Sweden
Words by Soulfire
Read 465 times
Written on 2010-06-30 at 00:22
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How we bond
Human lives are full of interaction & relations. Well, it's actually so that this world is built upon and directed by those very things. With the obvious exception of the small number of hermits, everybody depends on one another to a lower or higher degree. The vast majority of our relations with other people are simply just there: we buy our groceries at the store, we get our morning paper from the paperboy, we manage to not run into (or get hit by) a hundred of other commuters as we drive to work, and that's about that. Even if we are unfortunate on our way to work and end up very dependant on the hospital staff, most of them will be faces without names.But what about those really deep and strong relationships with people we love and care about? What about girlfriends, wives, grandparents, close friends and colleagues? How are those formed? A lot has been said about this, and there's a lot more to be said. I have no answers, but I do have a theory that I'll try to explain. It takes out during what you could describe as forced and extreme circumstances in adulthood.
"Friends are those who stay when everybody else leave" is a popular saying which holds a lot of truth, and one of the best ways to evoke all sides in a person and find out whether you can live with them or not is to indulge in an unusual settlement where you have to cooperate and where it's hard or even impossible to leave when you've "had enough". Traditionally, these circumstances are offered in such environments as the military, great disasters, street gangs and prisons. Just as traditionally, these environments aren't voluntarily, which is part of the experience gained. Excluding the military (which holds many positive characteristics and whose obligations have a time limit) the above mentioned environments are a harsh and not to constructive way to grow as a human being. But if personal development and mental growth in the interaction with others is desired, and this under circumstances with a sound level of force that brings out the best (and worst) of you and makes you see and accept this in others, what are the options?
To me, arranging a happening together with peers who strive for the same outcome is optimal, and creating a motion picture is a project that holds all of the desired features. I have witnessed this in various settings of LARPs and film-making and have not yet seized to become fascinated by the development in a group and its individuals. As I have mentioned in previous articles, shooting a film is no glamorous escape from daily chores like vacuum-cleaning and doing the dishes, it's all that p l u s the attempt to create something out of nothing in a magical state of existence. At our level, creating a film means putting thirty strangers in a house far away from home where everyone ends up doing a little more than their job description originally included. Thirty individuals from all paths of life, with needs and feelings (and I'm glad that we have them, may I add) that have to live under the same roof and co-exist and cooperate professionally in the joint effort towards our final destination: the full-length movie. Does it work? Yes, indeed. The opportunities for getting sick of each other are many, about as many as there are possible disturbances for the production (as I said, everything from cars to catering has to work in order for the magic to materialize) but since the team consists of reasonable people who share a common goal, we usually manage to work our way around the problems and choose all the opportunities for enjoying each others company and have a few beers and laughs as we celebrate life and what we are creating right now. For truth is that even though not all of us will stay in touch in the future, we do share something unique which is a bond between us, or at least a strong basis for creating such a bond. One step remains, namely the act of staying when you no longer have to, in this case: taking up contact after the shootings are over. The key to bonds created between strangers in adulthood might be here, this mixture between "has to" and "wants to" that friendship and soulmating consists of. There's another saying that friends are tested in the time of great needs, and the process of shooting a movie is full of them. If you want to know yourself and others (given that you're prepared to take it as it comes, whatever may come), then go ahead and dare to create a vision greater than yourself and work towards it, giving all it takes.
However, this article wouldn't be complete without mentioning the complexity of man and how you can find friends at the most unlikely places. It's a small world, and the more people you meet, the more evident the net of correlation and relationships become. This is even more obvious in the small community where we're shooting right now: if you're the only film-team among 10,000 souls and the producer is a resident, word gets around. The clerk at the grocery store and the mailman become familiar faces with a name (this is actually true for New York City as well, just take some time to chat with the waiter next time you're eating out and you'll see) and the will to give a little extra. Everywhere, there are opportunities for networking, socializing, working on projects and maybe the hardest and finest expression of them all: bonding.
Stefan Lindqvist, Sweden
Words by Soulfire
Read 465 times
Written on 2010-06-30 at 00:22
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
